Mozilla IT & Operations

IT goings-on

First up, the Mozilla Operations Centre (or MOC) is up and running! This new team currently comprises seven employees from all over the world, including the USA, India, and Europe. They’ll be handling such critical functions as monitoring, tier 1 and 2 support, and issue tracking and escalation for our entire infrastructure. What’s more, they’ll be acting as a sort of interface layer for the more technical aspects of Mozilla’s mobile partner relationships. Expect more news about this highly important team in the weeks and months to come.

The RelOps team stopped testing Firefox on OS X 10.7 due to falling usage and the similarity of coverage between 10.8 and 10.6. They re-purposed all 83 of the Mac Minis running 10.7 to now run and test on 10.6 – effectively doubling the available 10.6 test capacity. This had the net effect of reducing 10.6 wait times considerably, thus improving the overall level of service and – most importantly – increasing the satisfaction of developers testing against those targets.

They’re also making progress on the project to standardise all of their virtual machines on a single platform. Already, all of the KVM “odd ducks” at SCL3 have been replaced, which is a big win in terms of paying off technical debt for all of IT. Good work, RelOps!

On the topic of performance improvements, Solarce from the WebOps team cleaned out tonnes of old jobs and tasks from our in-house Jenkins system, which has dramatically reduced start-up and task run times, and improved stability overall.

Mozillians physically working in our offices were plagued by a small but highly irritating problem: the tablets used to check and book conference rooms were skewed by up to eight minutes, which meant it was sometimes tricky to reserve rooms properly. Thankfully, the Desktop and NetOps teams came to the rescue, and the problem is no longer!

Finally, in case you missed it earlier this week, Sheeri from the Database team put up an interesting post about a recent run of MySQL upgrades – highly recommended!

As always, if you have any questions or want to learn more, feel free to comment below or hop on to #it on irc.mozilla.org. See you next time!